Atrophy (10 page)

Putting her brother’s problems out of her mind, she took her dishes over to the galley bench and loaded up a clean plate of what little remained. It wasn’t much. Callan had already consumed three servings, which pretty much left scraps. But it was better than nothing, or worse, repli-rations. After grabbing some utensils, she left the chatter in the common room and made her way down to crew quarters, finding Tannin’s door still closed over.

She knocked the same as she had earlier and waited. At least this time he was likely to be fully clothed and not send her brain flat-lining like it had this morning when she’d gotten a glimpse of his muscled chest and abdomen. Seriously, she didn’t know why it had affected her that way. It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen a naked chest before. Occasionally she’d seen Callan and Jensen with no shirt, especially when it was hot or they were working out in the cargo bay.

But she’d never all but had a stroke at the sight of a guy with his shirt half on the way she had over Tannin. And then her rambling.
Frecking hell
. If a section of the hull had given way and sucked her out, she would have been thankful, because she’d totally embarrassed herself and every self-respecting woman in the galaxy.

The door slid open, but Tannin wasn’t standing on the other side. Curious, she stepped through to see him sitting at the table, concentration on the inset crystal screen. The hatchway closed behind her as she moved farther into the room.

“Is your door malfunctioning or something?”

He shook his head, not looking up at her as she walked over and set the plate down next to the screen that seemed to be running some indecipherable stream of numbers and letters.

“No, I just opened and closed it from here instead of getting up.” He glanced at the food and then tugged the plate a bit closer. “Oh, thanks.”

“I didn’t know you could open the doors from anywhere other than the door controls.” How had she been on this ship for four years and never been told that?

“Well, technically you can’t, unless you know how to access the ship’s data streams and echelon systems.”

She was about to ask him if he could do that, but realized the answer was obvious before the words even left her mouth.

“Right. Because of your mad hacking skills. So what are you doing now?” She really hoped he hadn’t been messing around in the
Imojenna’s
systems, because Rian would blow a pressure hatch if he found out about it.

Tannin leaned back in the chair and stretched his arms above his head, then sat forward to grab the plate.

“Do you have a commpad?” he asked instead of answering her question.

She sat to the side, pulled her device out of her pocket, and handed it over. Tannin secured it to the crystal screen and transferred information.

“I found some of your brother’s military records. In return for what was no doubt the hacking equivalent of playing chicken with a landing battle-cruiser, don’t tell him they came from me.”

He’d gotten the military records for her? Surprise and elated anticipation shot through her as she sat straighter and reached over to grab Tannin’s hand.

“Thank you so much. And I promise, if he finds out, I’ll just tell him I hired someone to find them for me or something. He’ll never know it was you.”

“Don’t get too excited. There’s not much in them, only the basic stuff you could probably find out anywhere. There are other reports, but they’re buried deep. It would take time I probably don’t have to access them. Even then, I don’t know if I could get to them without tripping some insane security measures.”

She squeezed his hand. “Don’t worry, I’ll take whatever you’ve got. It’s a start, and it’ll be more than I had before.”

His lips lifted in a half-smile, his fingers shifting to grip hers in return. And even though she’d taken his hand in excitement without thinking about it, now the warmth and sensation of his fingers twined with her traveled up her arm at hyper-speed and spread through the rest of her body on a low, swelling wave.

She tugged her hand free, dropping her gaze to the commpad as it beeped. A grin flashed over Tannin’s lips as he handed the commpad to her then picked up his fork and dug into the food she’d brought him.

Opening the new files, she found them listed in date order, from when Rian had joined the military to all the postings he’d taken over the years. She’d heard bits and pieces about most of them, particularly the eight months he’d spent on Minnea, cut off from supplies and barely surviving. But the report that most interested her was the last one before he went missing.

After Minnea, Rian had risen enough in rank to get off the ground and found a posting onboard a medium-sized battle-cruiser called the
Lone Cadence
. He’d been serving on it for about six months when the entire vessel went missing, the crew presumed KIA, though no wreckage had ever been found.

That was the point in time where Rian’s stories started getting hazy. All she knew was that somehow he was the only survivor and had been captured by the Reidar. Her guess was they’d tortured him. He never admitted or denied it; she’d pieced that together from his nightmares and random things he said every now and then.

The military records listed Rian as presumed KIA with the rest of the crew, and then there was a gap of three years before he was re-commissioned on one of the outer waystations. He had returned to his old rank of lieutenant captain, but then quickly moved up the ranks, many of the entries marked as special assignment with redacted information and a reference number to what was obviously another file.

The only full report was one of the final ones, the solo mission Rian had taken that had literally changed the course of the war and guaranteed the IPC’s victory. Zahli guessed the reason for its inclusion was because it was common knowledge.

She sighed and sat back again, a little deflated. She’d read through everything more thoroughly later on, to see if she could glean any clues, but it hadn’t been anywhere near what she’d hoped for.

“Nothing useful?”

At Tannin’s question, she glanced up to see he’d finished his meal and was regarding her with a steady gaze.

“Nothing leaps out, but I only flicked through. I’ll have a closer look later.”

He nodded, and started to say something else, but the sudden temporal-shift out of void-space cut him off. He grabbed the edge of the table, shaking his head a little. After so many jumps in and out of void-space, she’d mostly gotten used to it, but she remembered the woozy feeling she’d always had the first few months aboard.

She frowned. Lianna had told her they wouldn’t be leaving void-space until they reached Arleta, and that shouldn’t have been for another rotation.

“Thanks for these files. I need to get up to the bridge.” She pushed to her feet, shooting Tannin a quick smile.

“Is everything all right?” He stood a little more slowly and took a couple of unsteady steps before getting his bearings and following her to the hatchway.

“I’m sure it is, but I just want to check in.”

“Okay—”

The lights shut off, the
Imojenna
powering down to eerie silence until low, yellow auxiliary lighting came on.

“Clearly everything is not all right,” she muttered. She strode over to the door and stared at the dark crystal display of the door controls for a full second before she realized it was offline and she couldn’t swipe the door open.

“Frecking garbage compactor. Now what’s wrong with you?” She swore under her breath as she grabbed the handle to manually pull the door open. The hatchway was heavy, but she could have tugged it open herself—albeit with some difficulty. But Tannin stepped up beside her, gripping the handle just above her hands, and helped her drag the door open.

“Does this sort of thing happen regularly?” he asked as they stepped out in the dim corridor.

“All too often.” Well, maybe not a complete power-down like this—and that was only a guess at what had happened. Which meant environmentals weren’t working. Which meant no heat and no air. But she wasn’t going to tell Tannin that. No point in freaking him out unless they were facing a certain frozen, airless death.

Up on the bridge, Rian and Lianna were working at their consoles, Rian giving orders for Callan to go down and get a report from Jensen on the engines, since comms weren’t working.

“What happened?” she asked as Callan ducked by them, shooting Tannin a vicious look before he left the bridge.

“We’re dead in the drift,” Rian replied.

“Obviously,” she muttered. “I meant do you have any idea why?”

“Don’t you think if we knew why, we’d be fixing it by now?” Rian’s usual hard expression took on an edge of frustration.

“I hate to say it,” Lianna put in. “But I’m starting to think this was sabotage.”

Rian swore, pushing up from his console and then banging down a fist. “Of course it was, because they can’t kill me face to face. It’s easier to have my frecking ship do that for them.”

Zahli glanced up at Tannin, but if he was curious about who was trying to kill her brother, he wasn’t showing it.

“Rian, I know you probably won’t believe me, but I think Tannin can help.”

Chapter Seven

R
ian glanced over his shoulder to where Zahli stood with the scumrat, sure he couldn’t have heard her right.

“Sure, he can help by not being on my bridge. He can help by breathing less air so there’s more for the rest of us.”

He turned and looked back down at his dim screen, showing him nothing but a bunch of errors where the system controls should be. The usual icy sensation that always crept around in the back of his mind surged forward, pushed up by the ever-present black rage that lurked in the depths of his soul. The internal permafrost and the darkness were his constant companions. He could rely on them, and the absolute certainty that the Reidar would never stop trying to kill him.

“I’m serious, Rian. Tannin has a talent for systems. Remember how he got on the
Imojenna
? What could it hurt to let him take a look?”

“For all we know, this was his doing,” he threw over his shoulder, tapping the system reset icon, even though it hadn’t worked the first half a dozen times he’d tried it.

“And what would be the point of that?” Zahli had walked closer and half stepped around his console into his peripheral vision.

“Kill us all and steal the ship.”
It’s what I would have done.
He clamped his lips over the last bit of that sentence that almost tripped out. He didn’t have much of a filter and didn’t care all that much, but there were some truths he tried not to expose his sister to. For some frecking stupid reason, she still thought there was something worth saving inside him, and he’d failed to dissuade her of the notion so many times he’d long given up.

Zahli crossed her arms, glare deepening. “If you thought he was capable of something like that, you wouldn’t have let him stay onboard. It’s already getting cold in here, so at least let him try.”

His patience snapped, and he yanked his pulse pistol out of its holster, turning to line up the scumrat. He didn’t need this shite. Not the delay when he was already pushing it to reach Arleta in time, or the fact he couldn’t see what had caused his damn ship to shut down, or the realization that things were so desperate he was actually going to have to let some frecking hustler he knew next to nothing about into the systems.

“Rian—” Zahli started to step toward him, but he was faster and closed the distance between the scumrat and him, shoving his gun into the middle of the guy’s chest. It definitely went some ways to improving his mood.

The scumrat had gone still, his jaw clenched and expression tense, but he didn’t look scared, and he didn’t say anything, just watched him with a steady, but wary gaze.

“Did you mess with my ship?”

The guy’s chin tilted up slightly, but he otherwise didn’t flinch, didn’t show any signs of guilt or unease.

“I didn’t do this.”

He jammed the gun harder until the guy winced. “I don’t trust people on my best days and since I don’t know you, let’s just assume that I’m waiting for you to show your hand. You think you can fix my ship? Fine, clearly we’ve got nothing to lose by letting you try. But you make it worse, or I think you’re up to something, dead will be one of the fun options left available to you.”

“I won’t know if I can fix it until I have a look.” His voice came out even, as though having a gun against his chest was a regular occurrence. Considering he’d spent the past twelve years on Erebus, it probably wasn’t surprising that the guy had the balls to look him in the eye when he was holding a gun. On the other hand, maybe he just hadn’t heard many of the stories going around about him.

“Rian, put your gun away. There’s no need—”

“Oh, I think there’s every need. Consider it incentive not to screw things any worse than they already are.” Rian grabbed his shoulder and shoved him toward the console, keeping the gun on him.

“Again, what would be the point? If he can’t fix it, he’s going to die just as horribly as the rest of us.”

“Maybe he’s a special kind of stupid.”

The scumrat shot him a dirty look over his shoulder, then sat at the captain’s console and tapped the icon for auxiliary lighting, one of the only symbols still pulsing with dim light. After that, he had no idea what the guy did—he was accessing parts of the system he’d never seen in the entire four years he’d had this ship. In fact, the scumrat seemed so absorbed by what he was doing, he didn’t appear to notice the gun any longer. With a slow movement, he put the weapon away. No fun waving it around if it wasn’t threatening anyone.

“Your nav was right, this was sabotage,” the guy said after a few long moments.

“What kind of sabotage?” He crossed his arms, not wanting to concede that some ex-con had found so quickly what neither he nor Lianna hadn’t been able to.

“A virus. A pretty clever one, but it whoever launched it didn’t care about whether they left a trace.”

“So what’s it doing, besides the obvious?” Zahli asked, not seeming surprised by the scumrat’s proficiency.

“It’s been doing regular long and short range scans since we left Erebus. It was designed to kick in once the ship reached the most remote point, to ensure there weren’t any other ships, stations, or planets within rescue distance.”

Zahli’s expression tensed. “That doesn’t sound good.”

The guy shook his head. “It’s not. Because once the virus went online, it whitewashed the systems.
All
the systems. They went into overload and then simply shut down. There are safety protocols to ensure a ship doesn’t explode. If one system fails, it goes offline so it doesn’t affect other entities. This virus bastardized those safety programs and overloaded the whole network.”

“I don’t know what language you’re speaking, but it sounds like bullshite.”

Zahli shot him a frustrated look, but it was edged in apprehension. “Rian, that’s not helping.”

“Lianna?” He looked over to his engineer who’d been silently working at her own station.

Her expression was troubled as she looked up from her screen. “Every system I’ve checked had some catastrophic overload. It should have been impossible, but that’s what happened. There’s no other explanation.”

Frecking great. “Okay, now that’s we’ve established what went wrong, let’s get to fixing it. Personally I’ve got a long list of names to take out before I dearly-depart, so I sure as shite don’t plan on dying out here.”

“This isn’t a simple fix,” Lianna said, a tenor of darkness to her voice.

“We’ve got four hours of air, but we’ll probably freeze to death in a quarter of that time. You might want to consider fixing the heat first.” He turned and headed for the hatchway. “Things start looking bad, you’re the first one I’m going to shoot, scumrat.”

Rian hit the stairs and jogged down before anyone could argue with him. Walking into his dim quarters, he dragged both hands over his face, trying to force down the frustration, the pulsing anger pushing against his control. Frecking underhanded sons of bitches. At least when they’d sent assassins after him, he’d had someone to fight, someone to unleash the seething darkness on. Using methods like this, trying to turn his own ship into a floating coffin, all it did was piss him off, hardened his resolve to find them and slaughter every last one of the space-roaches.

He paced over to the cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Violaine, sucking down a few mouthfuls and then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, gripping the bottle tighter against the slight tremor.
Soon
. Soon he would make them suffer, for his death and millions of others.

Z
ahli dropped a blanket around Tannin’s shoulders and he shot her a brief smile before returning his concentration to the console. She handed another blanket off to Lianna, who murmured a thanks, her breath puffing in a white cloud.

It’d only been half an hour since the ship had shut down, but it was getting close to glacial. Rian had been right, if they couldn’t get the heat fixed, they’d freeze to death long before they ran out of air. Of course, if the shields had been working, the heat would have stayed inside, no problem.

Earlier, she’d gone down into the back section of the ship, to the two basic cabins they called the ‘guest rooms,’ which they never used for actual guests and instead had turned into storage. She’d collected a pile of blankets, and when she’d returned to the bridge, she’d found the rest of the crew had made their way up there, both her brother and Callan not bothering to hide their hostility toward Tannin as they watched him work. He and Lianna seemed to be coordinating well, however, shooting technical terms back and forth she had no hope of deciphering.

Instead of sitting down next to Jensen and Kira at the back of the bridge, she pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulder and paced, trying to keep warm as the temperature steadily dropped.

“How much longer?” Callan demanded. He’d refused her offer of a blanket, but stood with his arms wrapped around himself and a pissed off expression on his face. The way he was going, he’d be the first to freeze through stubborn stupidity.

“I don’t know, how deep is a nebula?” Tannin shot back, a hint of frustrated sarcasm in his tone.

“I don’t know,” Callan repeated in a mocking tone. “How many blasts from my nucleon gun would it take to splatter your brains?”

Tannin half turned his head, presumably to reply, but she gripped his shoulder. “Ignore him, the rest of us usually do.”

He nodded, holding her gaze for a moment, then returned his attention to the screen.

“If this goes warped, my dying wish is to put a hole in the scum bastard before I check out. Calling dibs, Cap’tin.” Callan took out one of his guns, checking the power pack.

“If it gets cold enough the firing mechanism will malfunction,” Rian muttered.

Callan shrugged. “Got a knife for a reason.”

Aggravation bloomed hot in her chest, making her forget all about the chill for a moment as she turned to face her brother and Callan.

“You really think talking about killing Tannin while he’s trying to fix your ship is the best way to motivate him?”

“Yep,” Callan replied, crossing his arms once again after putting his gun away.

“I’m estimating we’ve got about ten minutes before we start feeling the effects of the hypothermia that’s already setting in,” Rian said in an almost conversational tone, as if he wasn’t all that worried about their predicament. “After that, we’ve probably got another ten minutes before we start passing out. So yeah, maybe the very real threat of imminent death might motivate the scumrat into more fixing and less bitching.”

She’d been trying not to worry, trying not to let the fear take over, telling herself she wasn’t really that cold. But Rian’s words, though probably not intended to scare her, made her shivering that much worse and anxiety tighten her stomach into a knot. She strained to inhale more deeply, the cold aching along the back of her throat, but whether from the icy air or her apprehension, she couldn’t quite get a full breath in.

“Hey,” Tannin murmured. He glanced over his shoulder, presumably to see what her brother and Callan were doing, then reached over and took her hand. His fingers were cold, but his grip was firm. “We’re almost there, just hang on a few more minutes, okay?”

She returned his nod, sliding down to sit on the floor with her back against the column of the captain’s console. Her head was starting to get heavy, tiredness creeping up as she tightened her grip on the blanket that didn’t feel like it was doing anything.

Another few moments of silence went by, the tension climbing, almost as palpable as the white clouds from their breath.

“Ready when you are.” Lianna’s words made Zahli straighten and look up at Tannin, who nodded. She climbed to her feet, muscles stiff even though she hadn’t been still for long.

“Ready on this end,” Tannin replied.

“Let’s hope this works, because otherwise we’re all screwed.” Lianna huffed. “Restarting systems.”

Zahli found herself reaching for Tannin’s hand again after he tapped out a sequence on the screen and sat back, looking up at the viewport. She followed his gaze, searching for any flicker of the systems coming back online.

There was a low rumble from the bottom of the ship and then a vibrating whir as the lights came back on, and warm air cycled out of the vents.

Lianna whooped, and Kira and Jensen cheered. Zahli blew out a long breath as Tannin dragged a hand over his hair, his expression nothing short of relieved. He slowly stood, his hand still wrapped around hers.

“I suppose I have to count this as the second time you’ve saved me,” she murmured in a low voice so no one else could hear.

He shrugged, ducking his head in an almost self-conscious manner. “I don’t know that you could call what I did on Erebus saving you. Seemed to me you had things pretty well in hand. And Lianna did just as much work as I did, if not more, since she knows the
Imojenna’s
systems better.”

“I’m trying to say thanks, and you better accept it, because Rian probably won’t offer you any appreciation at all.”

One side of his lips lifted in a half-smile. “Well if you’re the one thanking me, I’d have to be an idiot not to accept it.”

Maybe almost freezing had made her brain malfunction, but there seemed to be something in the gleam of his gaze, something warm that made her heart bump up against the inside of her chest. If not for the cold, that look in his green-gray eyes would have definitely made her start feeling hot.

“Okay, everyone needs to get across to the galley for some coffee. We need warm liquids, stat,” Kira announced. “I’m going to check all of you, so no bitching. And if I tell you that you’ve got to go into the regen unit, I don’t want any arguing.”

“If the regen unit is going to warm me up faster, I’ll go in voluntarily.” Zahli turned from Tannin, shoving down the unexpected fuzzy feelings as she faced the ship’s doctor. It was probably just some sort of deferred gratitude for the fact he’d had a hand in saving her for the second time in a matter of rotations.

Rian stepped over to his console, seeming satisfied as he glanced down at the screen. “Sen, head down to the engine and check everything is operating like it should. Lianna, how long before we can splice into void-space?”